Just like you
by Sara Kovac
Summary: A retrospective about Amon Goeth's childhood, and how he got to became someone very similar to his father.


_Hi. This is my first Schindler's List fic. I hope you like it. And excuse me if I make a mistake, English is not my first language._

_Of course, I don't own Amon Goeth, I do own his family, because I invented them._

_**JUST LIKE YOU.**_

Jens Goeth was always drunk, except when working. And since we never saw him when working, I only can remember him drunk.

He fought in the Great War, and was away from home for a long time. When he came back, I was eleven years old. He was big, his eyes like ice everytime he looked at me or my mother, always icy, except when the alcohol made them shiny as they were about to melt. He was wounded in his right leg during the war, and he never got to recover completely, I remember his way of walking, the sound of his steps: strong one, the left leg, ant the right foot crawling a little. I still shiver when I remember that sound. It meant that he was coming.

My father came back as a complete stranger. At least that was what my mother used to say, that he was not like that when she married him. I don't think he was different, it was just a way for my mother to feel less guilty. The war was the only one to blame. It was the only thing that had made good Jens Goeth became a pityless animal. Because that was true, he felt no pity for anybody. He was perfectly cold when he hit his wife, mechanically, like he had planned every move, every bang, every place he was going to hit and how. He was perfectly cold when he was taking off his leather belt to "teach me", as he used to say. For me, all the damage was to make me learn. For mother, it was because she was just his. He owned her, so he could do anything he wanted to her. She has been mine since the day she said yes in front of God and in front of the world, he said. Then, he took her hand and showed her engagement ring. This is the proof, he said. As long as we are married, she has to obey me. She promised to obey me. And if she doesn't do it, I have the right to punish her. And it was not just hitting her. I remember hearing her crying, in a low voice, through the wall of my bedroom, and her sobs were mixed with my father's exclamations of pleasure.

I had two brothers and one sister. They were born as a product of my mother suffering, of those long nights of crying. Suddenly we were six at home and there was no enough money. My father went on drinking almost everything he earned as a workman in a bicycle factory, as before. He didn't want my mother to work, simply because he wanted to be her only way to survive. I had to go to school, even if he couldn't even read. My brothers were still too young. So there were no answers to our problem, when we didn't have enough to pay our rent, or just food, or if my mother borrowed something from more fortunate neighbours, it was a shame for him and he started beating. Didn't matter reasons, nor the one who he was going to hit. It was our fault, the fault of everyone of us. Except, of course, little Marina's. My sister was the only person my father respected. He loved her with every fibre of his being, he protected her as the animal he was, he could even kill for her, like when my brother Bernard, just ten months older than Marina, stole her doll, a badly made fabric body sewed to a broken doll head we found in the street. When my father found the doll under the bed Bernard and I used to share, the future became all black for us. I confessed it had been him, I was too scared to play the big brother and protect him. The slap in Bernard's ear was so strong that he could not hear for a week. My father became wild when it was about Marina. She was the only thing he cared about. My brothers and I started to hate her, involuntarily, as our father's love for her grew, our hate grew too. She was his little angel, his beloved daughter. And that love seemed so sick to us that we couldn't do anything but reject it.

One day, when she was six, she came down with flu. In a couple of days, weak as she was, she got worse and in less than ten days she died. It was the only time I saw my father crying. He crawled his wounded leg by Marina's bed, collapsed over her little girl corpse and cried, screaming like he had gone mad. I think it was the day when he really became mad, indeed. I didn't pour a single tear for my sister. I was secretly happy that she was dead. Not for her, but for my father. Now he had lost the thing he loved the most. Anyway he made me cry that night, his belt hitting my back once and again while he sobbed in a ridiculous drunk way. I didn't cry of sorrow, it was just physical pain. Tears escaped from my eyes, but they stopped as soon as my father was too tired and his arm hurt so much to continue. I stopped crying definitely that day. I was thirteen years old.

One day, at fifteen, I proposed my mother to kill him. To wait until the night, when he came home smelling of cheap alcohol, too dizzy to realise what was around him, to wait until he went to bed and slept deeply, and then take a knife and stick it into his chest, into his heart, once and twice and all the times it was necessary to be sure he wouldn't get up the next morning. She refused to look me and said no. Then I realised that it was just not that he owned her, but she let him own her.

That night I got someone to lend me a gun, and at midnight, I entered silently my parent's bedroom. I pointed my father's head but wasn't able to shoot. I concentrated, both my hands holding the weapon, but I didn't find the courage to shoot and finish him. I think I was too afraid of him, so afraid that I even feared him after death. Frustrated, I went out of the house and shot five bats which where hanging from a tree. They were my first shot, one by one, mechanically, just pointing and shooting. For a moment, I understood the way my father used to beat us. It was like some kind of system, it was designed only to harm. Just harm. It was the only thing which mattered. Then I came back home, looked for a vodka bottle my father used to drink, and swallowed. It burned, it hurt down my throat, down my chest, to my stomach. I bent myself in my waist and threw it all up. Ha. The bottle was there, in the dark, staring at me, challenging me. I took a smaller sip and didn't vomit this one. I felt strangely proud. Proud and sad at one time. I had just realised that I looked like my father much more than I imagined. I was exactly like him, and I couldn't fight that. The only thing that I regretted was that he had won. He had spent my whole life trying to teach me his way of seeing the world, and he had succeed. That night, for the first time, I understood him. He was as he was because it was just the way he was. And the same happened to me.

So, look at me now. It's being almost twenty years since that night, and still my father, wherever he is, can be proud of his eldest song, of his Amon. He gets drunk of cheap cognac every night. He beats his animalisticly beautiful Jew maid because he owns her. He enjoys hurting people, like his father used to do.

Look at me, father. I'm just like you.

_Did you like it? Didn't you? Then review and let me know, but please don't flame. _


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